Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by muth02446 532 days ago
IIRC Waymo only offers their service in certain places and does not use highways. Was this controlled for?
5 comments

There are so many things to control for… - compare to taxi / professional drivers - locations - times

Still a great nominal achievement but anytime a sponsored research study doesn’t even attempt to control for basic things it raises a lot of red flags.

Doesn't look like it:

> Swiss Re has more than 500,000 liability claims and more than 200 billion miles of exposure in its data bank. Waymo has logged 25.3 million fully autonomous miles available for analysis as well.

So looks like they took human-driven miles in all sorts of conditions, and compared it to Waymo's operation in a handful of southern states.

Although I would expect not using highways to be detrimental, statistically highways (especially controlled access highways) are the road types with the highest safety levels, thanks to having no intersections, more consistent speeds, and traffic separation.

We're on hacker news, you can download the study and presumably figure out how to open a PDF.

Page 12 "The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS"

They're on highways
Yes